PREMIERE: Horse Culture - Texaco

Kelly Kirwan

Witchy. Ritual. Proto-minimal. These are just a few of the tags that Horse Culture have bestowed upon their sound, and even more specifically, their latest single, "Texaco." The Blacksburg, VA-based trio (comprised of Nika Karen McKagen, Timothy Jacob Hawks and Walter Melon Porter) have delivered a song that evolves from a subtle, easily-absorbed (if not foreboding) melody to a steady, metallic clash that still never seems to slip into complete cacophony. It’s a velvety style of goth that’s as deceptively mesmerizing and ominous as watching a candle flicker—suddenly you’re unsure of how much time has passed, or the exact moment you slipped into rapture.

In the band's own words, “Horse Culture strives for an emotional resonance in this slow trudge towards death.” Call it fatalistic or existential, but it captures the mood that is "Texaco." It's an uneasy feeling that first drifts casually into the mind and then takes over, raising the hairs on the nape of your neck and building to a climax of guitar-shredding, cymbal-slamming proportions. The vocals come forth, at times, in the monotone style of an incantation, as an eerie chorus of oohs drifts through the background, like a whistle in the wind. The lyrics are nearly lost in the array of looping chords and thumping percussion that gradually intensifies, but we latch onto them, like a guiding light in a storm. "Texaco" is curious track, evoking a sly sort of hypnotism that has us hooked long before we come to realize it.

REVIEW: Nick Hakim - Green Twins

Laura Kerry

The cover of Nick Hakim’s debut LP sports a surrealist, green-hued landscape with a detached eyeball gazing at itself in the mirror. Like an updated Salvador Dali painting, it seems to comment on the way the mind perceives itself. The eyeball is bare and exposed, suggesting vulnerability in introspection.

On Green Twins, Hakim continually makes himself vulnerable. The follow-up to his dual EP, Where Will We Go, which he made while attending the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston, the album perfects the artist’s unique breed of tender soul music. Sometimes delicate and soft, sometimes strong and guttural, Hakim’s voice betrays yearning, joy, love, and ache, all with seeming ease in his singing and lyric-writing. “If there's a god /...I bet she looks like you,” he proclaims commandingly on “Bet She Looks Like You”; “Let me inside of your mind / I’ll live inside of you / To find what you're looking for,” he sings in a near-whisper over mellow keys on “Needy Bees”; and in “The Want,” his voice is delicate enough to break for a quick, barely perceptible moment as he sings, “I wanted her.”

Green Twins is so soulful and intimate that it partially disguises the quirkier elements that add texture and color to the music. Like its cover, the album contains a psychedelic strain visible in spacey accents of synth and other effects, playful dynamics, and dreamy reverb. Hakim assimilates these—along with other traces of an eclectic range of genres—effortlessly. In “Cuffed,” a song about embracing one’s “vices without shame,” his sensual delivery sounds at times like D’Angelo and his hip-hop phrasing sounds at others like Frank Ocean. In “Roller Skates,” a song with deep heartbeat percussion, his processed voice is funky before it is joined by an ascending line of harmonies that recall Motown. In “TYAF,” sparse and shimmering verses give way to dense psych-rock choruses with muffled but energetic drums.

The more you listen to Hakim’s album, the more these kinds of unexpected details emerge. What at first appears straightforward—or at least relatively so—reveals itself to be complex, strange, and multi-dimensional. He has created an entire world in the space of an album, meticulously constructed from a mind that has been trained in harmony and composition and an ear that has spent a lifetime immersed in a diverse pool of music. Through it all, though, Hakim’s gaze remains focused and introspective, like the eye in the cover art. Warm and intriguing, Green Twins draws on the thoughts and feelings of its creator, spinning them into a beautiful debut.

VIDEO PREMIERE: Room Thirteen - Roccopulco

Roccopulco from Room Thirteen on Vimeo.

Laura Kerry

The debut album of the band Room Thirteen came out this past winter, but its spirit season has arrived just in time for the New Orleans-based group to release the video for the title track, “Roccopulco.” A mix of dreamy vocals, bossa nova guitar, and jazzy horns, the song sounds like a vision of the ‘60s imagined while drifting off to sleep on a bright-colored towel at the beach.

The video combines this retro tone with more contemporary touches. Set on a dark stage, it features a blazer- and moustache-sporting saxophonist playing an impassioned solo and backup dancers moving slowly in unison as the song cycles through shimmering harmonies. But the dancers contain elements of both go-go and American Apparel, one of the many ways in which the old-timey and tropical touches don’t take themselves too seriously. Fish dissolve into psychedelic patterns; the sax solo breaks into a cheesy split-screen; and a collection of fruits, leafy plants, and a mysterious glittery “D” appear on stage in the beginning and end before confetti rains down, a delightfully odd way to illustrate their equatorial party vibe. Theatrical, sultry, silly, and as mesmerizing as the song, the video for “Roccopulco” is the perfect way to reimagine Room Thirteen’s summery music.

PREMIERE: Joel Michael Howard - Petraeus

Laura Kerry

With the exception of a song filled with meows and ironic boasts about fame, Joel Michael Howard has spent the last couple of years releasing cleverly orchestrated, downtempo pop songs about love and loss. In his newest track off of his second full-length, 5th Grade, Part B, Howard pursues a different emotional path: being over it.

More rhythmic than most of his other work, “Petraeus” begins with a dry drum loop and a deep, steady bass line that march the song through talk of war and brotherhood. When Howard’s voice enters, it is soft and soulful, floating weightlessly above the heartier pop instrumentation and sounding a bit like Unknown Mortal Orchestra. As the song rises to the chorus, he continues gently, “I thought we we could all be brothers now / Hold hands and love one another now” between woozy synth lines. But the next line is more forceful; as the artist sings, “Fuck that, it’s a thought lost anyhow,” his voice is as percussive as the beat beneath it. Smooth, catchy, and assured, “Patraeus” is a good anthem for those in need of moving beyond something (including disgraced former CIA directors, apparently).

REVIEW: Hoops - Routines

Laura Kerry

While listening to Hoops, you might at first be tempted to play a game of musical analogs, obsessively identifying what artists they sound like in a given moment. Rife with the familiar sounds of ‘80s synths and contemporary jangly guitars, the Indiana-based band provides plenty of fodder for such an activity. In the past, they’ve been compared to everything from Real Estate and Wild Nothing to Tears for Fears. But for the most part, the game never finds a satisfactory conclusion; a perfect match never settles. Above all, you will find, Hoops just sound like themselves.

That sound is something they’ve developed over a series of popular cassette tapes from the last few years, a 2016 EP, and finally, in their debut full-length, Routine, out on Fat Possum. The band’s history extends further back, though. The three core members—Drew Auscherman, Keagan Beresford, and Kevin Krauter—have been friends since the sixth grade. Hoops began with guitarist Auscherman as a solo ambient music project that he produced in his Bloomington bedroom. Drawn to the same music, the trio soon joined forces to form a casual band that eventually turned serious.

Listening to Routine, the band’s guitarist-led origins come as no surprise. Throughout the album’s 11 well-honed pop tracks, the guitar carries as much weight as the vocals. In songs such as “Rules,” “On Top,” and “Management,” the singer’s voice is subdued, subsumed by shoegaze fuzz, but the guitar is shimmering and bright as it weaves through catchy riffs. In others like “All My Life,” the voice and guitar share and trade the melody, shifting dynamically as they come together and pull apart. In “Benjals,” guitar serves as the only melody in an all-instrumental track, but the concise song still manages to latch on with its version of a verse-chorus structure.

But Routines doesn’t function on wordless catchy melodies alone; just as important to Hoops’ breed of pop are the stories at the foundations of their songs. As they said in an interview, the trio listens as much to Nick Drake as they do Michael Jackson and Sade. And in many of their songs, these contemplative origins show. “Still remember the clothes you wore,” they sing in a song about moving past feelings, “On Letting Go”; the line in the chorus, “All my life keeps getting away from me,” gives “All My Life” its title; and in the optimistically titled “Sun’s Out,” they sadly sing, “Meet me in the sunlight / Meet me where the moon shines / I can never be the one you want.” Reflecting on time and the anxieties of past love, screwing up love, and potential love in unadorned but expressive lyrics, Routines sometimes feels like New Order (here’s that game resurfacing) and other ‘80s new wave bands that couch sad-sack sentiments in sparkling synths and danceable beats. Bright and sunny but with the right touch of wistfulness, Hoops’ new album is the perfect mix to accompany us into the summer.